Tags:

Around 200 union workers and some local politicians protested wage cuts and other givebacks required by the Bush administration’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler.

“The call for wage cuts is an attack on the middle class,” said Rex Lux, a truck driver at Chrysler who said he had come to the rally to show his support for organized labor. “The middle class send their kids to college, they buy cars and they keep the American economy going.”

“Why break the middle class?” he asked.

The protest in Warren, Michigan, came two days after a smaller rally (pictured above) outside the Detroit auto show by members of the United Auto Workers union.

The $17.4 billion federal bailout for the U.S. automakers includes concession targets such as making union-represented workers’ wages competitive with foreign manufacturers by December 2009 and eliminating the union jobs banks, which pays laid-off workers.

Tags:

Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker (right, in the driver’s seat next to Mark Fields, Ford’s president of the Americas), who pushed for tough conditions on the $17.4 billion U.S. government bailout for General Motors and Chrysler, said at the Detroit auto show that he hoped Chrysler would find a merger partner to survive.

Tags:

Listening to GM Europe CEO Carl-Peter Forster (right), there is a big side benefit of having the thankless job of running a business in danger of being dragged under by its foundering parent.

For one, you are not publicly humiliated by lawmakers with an ax to grind the next time you try and hit them up for aid.

Whereas U.S. congressmen eager to score points with taxpayers were just itching to take turns tag-teaming his boss Rick Wagoner, Forster said he is treated with far more respect and understanding by the German and Swedish governments when he participates in discussions over receiving billions in state loan guarantees. GM is looking to sell its Saab brand in Sweden.

Asked at the Detroit auto show whether the talks were considered in Europe to be as controversial as those in Washington, Forster replied: “Interestingly enough, the Europeans take a very, very different approach. Much less hostile, virtually not hostile at all, seeing the automotive industry as a very important industry.”

GM Europe has a funding requirement peaking this year, in part due to this year’s roll-out of the new Opel Astra and Saab 9-5 cars, key models for both brands.

”They (state officials) understand the extraordinary circumstances in Europe — by the way, the circumstances in the U.S. are even more extraordinary than in Europe. They know how important the industry is for the European economy and particularly for certain member states like Germany, France, Italy, the UK and so on. Absolutely no hostility, very open, understand the situation and try to come up with a solution.”

Perhaps lawmakers in the more socialist governments across the Atlantic better realize what would happen if Opel or Saab cannot get the loan guarantees needed to access to the European Investment Bank’s 16 billion-euro fund for the European auto industry, which is only open to companies with an investment grade rating.

Tags:

This year’s roundtable event for the Society of Automotive Analysts (SAA) — held on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show — was always likely to be a somber affair, what with the U.S. economy in recession and auto sales falling off a cliff.

But even though the outlook for the sector this year is grim, analysts and other attendees in the half-empty room managed a few gallows-humor laughs.

“I see we have a few empty pews here,” Finbarr O’Neill, president of automotive forecasting firm J.D. Power and Associates (left), said to a few chuckles.

Many analysts have moved on since last year’s show, either because the firms or banks they worked for have gone belly up, or because their employers no longer feel the need to cover the U.S. automakers when their stocks have performed so poorly.

Even though the SAA rented a much smaller conference room at the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit — also home to the headquarters of General Motors — than for last year’s event, there were nonetheless quite a few vacant chairs.

O’Neill proceeded to tell a joke about an Irish bank robbery — prefaced with the fact that he is himself of Irish heritage — and explained to the audience that the reason he was telling it was that they would need to keep laughing despite the awful auto sales outlook that he delivered. J.D. Power expects that U.S. auto sales in 2009 will be the worst since 1982.

“Let’s maintain our sense of humor folks. We’re going to need it.”

But much of the laughter was at unintentional gaffes.

In the introduction for Paul Taylor, chief economist at the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), one of the hosts said the NADA had 2,200 members before correcting that figure to 22,000. Chuckles greeted the mistake, because the NADA is losing members at quite a pace.

The NADA says there were 700 fewer U.S. car dealers at the end of 2008 than at the beginning and expects there to be 900 fewer dealers still by the end of 2009.

But one of the biggest laughs was reserved for a comment from Ford’s senior economist Emily Kolinski Morris (right) in a Q&A session after she and Taylor spoke.

A member of the audience asked whether Kolinski Morris and Taylor would described the current U.S. downturn as a recession or a depression.

Tags:

Reeling from crisis and in hock to the federal government for $13.4 billion, General Motors spent only about half of what it normally spends on its display at the Detroit auto show this year. There were no pyrotechnics, no marching bands, no celebrities, no models.

Tags:

Competitors in the U.S. auto sector the last few years have had reasons to snicker at Chinese automakers when they appear at the Detroit auto show, thanks to horrible translations in advertising handouts that might lead, for example, consumers to believe a Chinese car could catch fire in cold weather.